Introduction

Syllabus

Part I

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Part II

Chapter One

Back to Realelvish

Phonology is the study of how sounds are put together and change each other. This is very important for making compounds and names. We must make certain that the word fits into these rules.

Something that will come up often in this lesson is the difference between Sindarin and Noldorin. Originally, the language we know as Sindarin was going to be spoken by the Noldor. Then, Tolkien changed his mind and made it the language of the Sindar instead. As that happened, he changed his mind on how many sounds developed. Unfortunately for we Tolkien-Linguists, the vocabulary of Noldorin is much larger and more detailed than the Sindarin vocabularies. So, it is a common practice to "normalize" or "reconstruct" words from Noldorin into Sindarin to fill out our dictionaries. I'm not saying this is a bad practice at all… in fact, I do it often, and I criticize those who don't normalize the Noldorin words they borrow in their Sindarin translations. The only problem is that Tolkien kept changing his mind, and sometimes the reconstructions just don't work in Sindarin, as you will see. It is a powerful tool, but one must use it with caution.

About [ej], [oɛ], and [uj]

Their frequency of not appearing suggests that these simply are rare diphthongs in Sindarin, and in the next list, I won't include them unless there is other missing vowels to support the idea that they are incompatible. Also, if a vowel present in a diphthong somehow doesn't come up elsewhere, I'm won't include it.

Beginnings of Words

Lone consonant+vowel/diphthong is the first set we will analyze.

The approximants seem to be very picky about the vowels that can buddy up with them. They don't like to be pared up with the vowels that are too similar to themselves. As you can see, [w] and [ʍ] don't like rounded vowels, and [j] doesn't like high front vowels.

What consonants can be pared up at the beginnings of words?

In these initial two-consonant pairs, stops and fricatives are the only types that can be the first of the initial pair. The second of the initial pair must be a voiced trill, liquid, or glide.

[l] is picky about the consonants that can precede it, and doesn't follow alveolar consonants, (you will note that [l] is also alveolar.)

On the other hand, [w] refuses to follow anything except consonants articulated in the same place as it is: velar consonants [x] and [g].

[f] is an odd one, and it rejects anything but an [l]. I think it's because of the way that the [r] is articulated, or it could be that the history of the language just doesn't end up making any [fr] combinations.

Once again, [w] shows its dislike for high, rounded vowels.

The Ends of Words

Lone, Word-final Consonants

I included the double-consonants; seeing as they are the same ending sounds, just lengthened.

Observe this chart of consonants that appear at the end of words:

Most of the unvoiced letters are gone. The only ones remaining are [f], [θ], [x], and [s]. Therefore, only voiceless fricatives can remain so at the ends of Sindarin words.

The labials once again have a strong showing of intolerance for rounded vowels. However, [m] doesn't seem to fit the pattern very well, and I'm inclined to think that [m] is actually compatible with any vowel or diphthong. [v] only seems to object to [u], and it can come after a [u] inside words, so I think that this also can be negated. [b] might be compatible with anything because there isn't a very strong pattern with the sounds that it didn't appear with. Both [y] and [o] are rounded vowels, true. But why then does it accept [au]? There is, however, only one word that [aub] appears in; "nawb" (thumb), so that conclusion is tenuous at best. I was most surprised to find a [yw] combination; so surprised that I wonder if "nŷw", a reconstruction from the Noldorin word, "hniof", is usable.

Interestingly enough, the velar sibilants [x] and [ŋ] are also rejecting [u]s.

Word-final Consonant Pairs

You'll notice that I didn't include [-vn] in this list. That is a relic from Noldorin, which I believe Tolkien got rid of in favor of [-m] or putting a vowel between the [v] and the [n]. By the way, it's written as "fn."

[s] or [z]?

Tolkien didn't intend for S to be voiced, but it looks like he might have changed his mind. If Tolkien hadn't said, "S is always voiceless, as in English so, geese; the z-sound did not occur in contemporary Quenya or Sindarin." I would guess that [s] could be pronounced as a [z] when proceeding a [g]. I believe that his strong words against voicing the S was to make certain that we English speakers would change the pronunciation of the words in accordance to our own phonology. In particular, I think he was concerned with the voicing of the plural and possessive S in English. Here are all of the examples that we have regarding the [sk]/[sg] examples. I've bolded the ones that were changed in the transition.

As you can see, both [sk] and [sg] can exist in the same environments in Sindarin. Since there is no phonemic /z/ in Sindarin, we can guess that to Elven ears, [s] and [z] are the same. With this information, I've concluded that [z] is an allophone of [s] when preceding a [g] in Sindarin.

The Middles of Words

Consonants Between Vowels

When viewing this chart, you will notice that it looks almost exactly the same as the word-final consonant chart, with only a few differences. [s] is always geminate, or doubled, intervocalicly (a fancy term referring to a sound between two vowels.) Also, [m], [n], and [r] can be geminate. In Noldorin, there was a geminate [n] that could occur word finally, but it appears that Tolkien did away with that by the time he wrote The Lord of the Rings, instead deciding that [-nn] should be either [-n] or [-nd], depending on the number of syllables the word has.

Two Consonants Between Vowels

This chart is of all of the known intervocalic consonant clusters in Sindarin.

Again, I didn't include [vn]. I have a chart of all of the "fn" words that I think should be changed when translating in LotR-style Sindarin, and the way that they should be changed. The ones that I reconstructed are in bold.

There is a similar case with "fr", and I have a chart to go with it too, but with this one, we know the forms that Tolkien decided on. One thing that Tolkien appears to have not changed is the form when being combined with another word or suffix beginning in a vowel.

But here, we're stepping into morphology, so we need to take a step back, and move on to the next lesson.